Arshid Malik
Last Sunday we had planned a family picnic. We were not going into the wilderness, back to nature as one might say, but to a shopping mall – the mall was my wife’s idea. The shopping mall I am talking about here is enormous, yes I mean enormous, perhaps perfect for losing your identity to it. We had planned to leave early in the morning so that we could have some moments of calm while we were there and then of course the shopping frenzy would take over. We woke up to inclement weather conditions. The sky was dark grey and it was raining. Before I could take the first sip of my coffee, my wife announced in an authoritative tone, “The picnic stands cancelled”. It sounded like she was calling off a special mission to save the country, but then all things are important to women, be it the laundry or the new imitation jewellery that the neighbor’s wife was sporting the other day. “Why are we cancelling the picnic,” I asked. “Well you moron, can’t you see that it is raining and by the look of it the weather will get worse by afternoon.” “But we are going to a mall and presumably it doesn’t rain in there,” I interjected. “You can go if you want to because, yes, you are a moron after all. Don’t you see the point that while shopping in cloudy weather I won’t be able to tell the colours of the fabric well? Besides, I just don’t want to go.” The last sentence of the verbo hit me hard in the stomach. I had been grilled for five days, being told that I would somehow spoil the whole thing and eventually not take the family out for a picnic in the mall. I do not vouch for it, but I tell you women are something else.
Women have been the subject of intriguing debate and mystery-laden poetry for centuries now. Great minds of earlier centuries have warned us (men) about the phenomenon called woman. In my opinion women have a second brain hidden somewhere inside their ankles that makes them overpower and outdo anything and almost everything they encounter. I won’t say that a woman’s mind is wicked because I don’t want to end up fighting over it by the time I make it home, but I would hint at something like that. “Women are fickle” is something I can live with. Well, the fact is that it is just impossible to beat women at their logic which is a bit illogical almost always. Women also possess a strange reasoning ability that beats that heck at least out of me (I am not sure whether my fellow men would care to confess to this fact).
Last week my wife’s computer broke down while I was away from home for a couple of days. I came to know about this “horrifying” fact when my phone started ringing to a particular tone I have set for extreme danger situations. The first “compliment” I earned from my wife was that I was never around. The second came banging in announcing that I was a bird-brain and a knuckle-head who didn’t even know where he was going. The third was a bit of a ridicule mixed with a proportioned batter of diminutive intuition and slam-dunking which declared that I always purchased second-hand and faulty things for my wife, polished it clandestinely, and installed fake stickers depicting brand names and logos. It sounded like a “Zionist conspiracy”. My wife’s blaring almost tore the edges off the speaker on the cell-phone, as she announced that I should end my “official ordeal” and come home immediately to fix the thing – the computer. I managed to skip a day off the conference I was attending and screeched home. I was surely not greeted but very well treated as if I had been the master-mind of a civic carnage. Anyhow, I managed to get hold of the laptop and noticed that it was out of battery power. I plugged in the adapter cable and it was up and working in no time. I did not dare to disclose this eventuality to my wife who would never have accepted the fact that she had not charged the laptop and would have been held guilty for slander and conspiracy aimed at sabotaging her scheduled presentation at her office while I had been off “enjoying the perceived applauds of my bosses and consequent promotion”.
All this makes me wonder, what is it with women? What do they have against men? Well, yes we have presumably suppressed them for ages but these men we are speaking about here are our great-great-grandfathers and we do not even know their names. Why are we being targeted for “crimes’ committed by generations that are epochs away from our lifetimes? And what’s with the ridicule and negation? And we are supposed to bear with it all because our fore-fathers thought themselves superior to women or something akin to that.
I was the conspirator behind my wife’s disappeared sock a few months back. Earlier I was the instigator who had dared to tell her that the bean’s she had cooked smelt of cheese. The latter was supposedly a compliment ill-accepted. Earlier, I was held guilty for a three-day electricity breakdown. If the grid station decides or is forced to shut down electricity for repairs for three consecutive days, how am I to blame? But never could I beat the logic of a woman. When I presented the same argument to my wife this is what she had to say: “You have bribed people at the grid station and have forced them to shut down electricity to our home for an entire three days.” When I asked as to why I would do that and pay bribes to strangers to inflict injury on my own family and the rest of the locality (she had not even bothered to look outside and realize that power to the entire locality had been shutdown, she replied, “Because you have a secret agenda to fortify the fences that ‘contain’ women at the very core of your masochistic personality”. This made my mind tick and I was practically in a gridlock for a week’s time almost believing that I was bipolar or delusional and had actually being planning an agenda of extermination of the whole womankind. But, it was only a week. I wish it had lasted longer.
